What is the future of geohealth? One of the gaps in our knowledge is the lack of near real-time data on the ambient environment people experience as they go about their daily lives. This is changing rapidly with the advent of location enabled devices and wearable sensors on platforms such as smart phones. Her is a quick listing of enabling technologies for the complex citizen sensor – an individual with several sensors that together quantify that citizens ambient environment.
Arduino and adafruit couple open hardware with small, wearable sensors.
Safecast is a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements to empower people with data about their environments. Is this a model for the citizen scientist? Imagine a Baseline Environmental Assessment along the lines of the annual Christmas birdcount.
Muse is an emerging technology for detecting brain waves in real time and streaming the data to a location-enabled device such as a smart phone. Coupled with other sensors, could this provide the perceptual information on walkability, safety, and neighborhoods needed to understand what the citizen sensor is perceiving?
Google glass will be available to consumers very soon. Could it provide the video stream needed to quantify just what the citizen sensor is experiencing? How might this advance a complex sensor that quantifies physiology, environment, thought, and visual experience?
Makes you want to wire yourself up, join your neighbors, and figure out those gaps in our knowledge of geohealth that define health/environment relationships.